


The Slow Dance Of The Infinite Stars

by everyperfectsummer



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Fairy Tale Elements, M/M, also loosely based on icarus/apollo, but fundamentally different from my other coldflash icarus/apollo au I swear, loosely based on stardust by neil gaiman, yes editing we do not die
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-11
Updated: 2017-12-11
Packaged: 2019-02-13 13:36:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12985176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everyperfectsummer/pseuds/everyperfectsummer
Summary: "My heart... It feels like my chest can barely contain it. Like it's trying to escape because it doesn't belong to me any more. It belongs to you. And if you wanted it, I'd wish for nothing in exchange - no gifts. No goods. No demonstrations of devotion. Nothing but knowing you loved me too. Just your heart, in exchange for mine.” - Neil GaimanThe prompt was "coldflash fairytale au" and herein are 3 short coldflash stardust-inspired stories.





	The Slow Dance Of The Infinite Stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Crimson1](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crimson1/gifts).



> Hey! The prompt was “fairytale au” and my brain went from fairytale to Stardust, the neil gaiman novel, and my muse looked at every other fairytale I put in front of it and refused to touch them so I present to you three different coldflash love stories loosely based on stardust, one also semi based on icarus/apollo. The quotes beginning each tiny story are from Stardust.  
> For warnings/etc that contain spoilerish things, check the endnotes!  
> This has been edited but also it's finals for me right now so I'm not entirely sure that this is even in English. If you spot a typo, please let me know!

(one)

_ “A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?" Pointless, really..."Do the stars gaze back?" Now, that's a question.”  _

 

It is beautiful and brilliant, but it is not and will never be an entity, a being that that goes beyond chemical reactions into feelings and thoughts no one can touch. Not that anyone can touch any aspect of it. It is fire, it is lightning, it burns brighter and hotter than any star in its section of space. It is also the only star in its section of space who is alone. The nearest star over doesn’t have much in its orbit, but it has several planets, most of them perfectly smooth spheres of swirling gas and one -- one solid, misshapen, broken and cracked and  _ alive. _

 

This living planet has life on it, but it/he’s alive as well, grows more alive as more living creatures live on and within him and believe in his existence. They tell stories of his cruelty, of winters that kill, crops lost to frost, people lost to frostbite, but they tell stories of his compassion, too. Of the rain that let those crops grow at all, of the being the cradle in which all of his people were born, and they believe in him and bring him to life and they give him a name, and that name is Len.

 

No one does any such thing for the star, distant and tiny in the sky, and it follows the directions of their belief, the box he has been in since before he was anything but an it, until he doesn’t.

 

The star twinkles. The star shines. The star falls in love, and the star falls. No - the star  _ leaps, _ shedding form and flame as he falls through the air. He leaves the vast majority of his body behind him, illuminating the sky, leaving only a small burning figure to fall through the atmosphere of the planet, the planet that he’s fallen in love with. He’s watched Len develop, grow, turn from a bare rock with dirt here and water there into a thriving home to billions - trillions - more - of tiny life forms, go from an object to a person, and observing may change the nature of the observed but it also changes the observer, and seeing one “it” become Len has made it become a him. He’s watched the life forms burst into being, waddle about, die, disintegrate, and be incorporated into more beings, living anew. Watched Len’s surface turn green and brown in waves as he orbits his star, watched the water that cloaks him ebb and flow with the moon. He’s seen it all and finally,  _ finally, _ is going to be part of it.

 

He falls through the clouds, a fraction of his former self, laughing as the water around him heats, turning a rainstorm into clouds all the way down as it evaporates. He comes to a rough stop in the bottom of a valley, hitting the ground so hard he becomes partially immersed in the soil, but stars are tough. He has burned in the blackness and bleakness of space: he can survive a brutal welcome to Len’s surface, to the planet he’s loved for so long. He climbs out of the crater he created, still laughing, and sets off to explore his new home, footsteps scorching the ground beneath him as he goes.

 

(two)

_ “[Barry]and [Len] were happy together. Not forever-after, for Time, the thief, eventually takes all things into his dusty storehouse, but they were happy, as these things go, for a long while.” _

 

He spends his days shining and spinning and traveling both gracefully and speedily through the cosmos while watching the rest of the universe, watching other stars and darling little planets and whirring comets go past. He gets to know his neighbors, and since he travels quickly compared to the rest, his neighborhood is ever growing. He doesn’t have planets or asteroids of his own, but delights in those of others. One of his friends has four planets orbiting her, all perfect in their own ways, and a nearby star has thirteen!

 

His favorite star isn’t his nearest neighbor, is a few hundred light years too far away to even count as a neighbor, but is closest to him on an emotional level. They twinkle at each other, creating sunspots and solar flares for each other’s amusement. Sure, it takes time for their messages to reach each other, but they’re stars, and have plenty of it to spare. Over the centuries, they get to know each other, developing in-jokes and gossiping about the other stars. Though far apart, they’re as close as stars can get. 

 

They got off to a rocky start, both of them too close to each other which poses actual danger, both of them scared and blaming the other. Barry realized fairly quickly that their proximity was no more Len’s fault than his own, both of them set to chart the heavens on courses they can’t control, and forgave him almost as soon as he’d gotten mad. To this day, millions of years and hundreds of lightyears away from the incident that had frightened them both so badly, Len has never said he’s not mad anymore.

 

Given that he  _ has _ said a truly horrific number of puns, Barry figures it’s safe to assume the anger’s over anyway.

 

Some of his fellow stars view his love as doomed, pointing out the issue of distance, of contact, of how he and Len can never have it. There are ways, if you fall in love with a planet or a moon or even an asteroid, to strip yourself down, let most of yourself disintegrate into space, and go live on the sphere you’ve fallen in love with. But there is no living on a star, even for another. He doesn’t care. He can never come close to Len without endangering them both, but he can talk to him, joke with him, laugh with him, love him. That’s all he gets, sure, but that’s all he wants, as well. The other stars call them a tragedy and he and Len ignore them. They spend their days sending each other messages across the galaxy, in an eternal long distance relationship, a merry dance that will last until they each burn out.

 

(three)

_ “There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire.” _

 

This third star doesn’t fall in love with a planet he can live on, or a star he can live with. He falls in love with a boy, finite and fleeting and only a small speck on one of his many planets, falls in love instantly as he sees the boy soar towards him on wings of wax.

 

He loses the boy almost as soon as he gains him, the boy flying too high, too close. He tries, as soon as he realises what’s happening, realizes what’s destroying his love’s wings, to shine dimmer, shine weaker, shine colder - but it’s too little, too late, and the wings melt, depositing his love into the sea, to drown and die.

 

He grieves for the person he never really got a chance to meet, grieves for everything that could have been, grieves for what he lost far too soon. He can’t shine directly on anyone but he tries, tries to follow his love’s sister around and make the rest of her days as bright as he can. Lisa, he learns as time goes by, her name is Lisa, and her brother’s name, his love’s name, was Len. It’s the blink of an eye before she’s gone, too, human lives so fast and fleeting, but she loved people besides her brother just as he has loved others as well, and he has come to care for her other loved ones as he came to care for her. His love for Lisa was originally based entirely on his love for Len and Len’s love for her and came to be about her as a person, as a witty and admittedly morally terrible person who is kind and cruel by turns, and the same comes to be true of her children and their children, all of them people he treasures as people, not just as tangential links to Len but Len is the cause and the catalyst.

 

He may have only noticed his love for an instant, but he’s a star: he didn’t see his appearance or hear his voice as he fell, he perceived him in a way only stars can: truly, wholly, knowing any and everything about Len, though he only actually saw him in those few minutes of flight and falling. Knows that Len loved him first, not as Barry exactly, but as a star, as a source of hope, light, freedom from the things in his life that haunted him, from the fear the he himself was nothing but darkness. Some days, Barry thinks he’d rather Len walked in darkness all his days but lived long enough to learn to love the dark: others, he feels ashamed of his selfishness in wanting Len safe rather than happy, and hopes that his quest for light brought him happiness even if it did bring him death.

 

One of his friends has fallen in love with someone on his planet, the planet where his love used to live, and sheds most of herself across the sky to join her love. Barry is happy for her, truly is, but bitter as well, would never take the chance away from her but wishes that he’d had a chance too. Stars don’t live forever but they do live longer than any humans can, which means that all star/human romances are indeed starcrossed. He knows this, knows that there would never have been a happy ending for them, but he can’t help wishing that they at least had a start and a middle, instead of an epilogue that is most of the story.

 

He’s nearing the end of his life, all those billions of years passed by and about a century to go when he decides to leave the sky and visit his love’s home for the first time. There is another sun in this earth’s sky: the climate may change, but life will survive without him in the heavens, and he wishes to explore earth.

 

He’s been there for about a year, marveling at all of the things that he’s looked on from afar but never touched, and meeting people, all of them insignificant in the universe but with universes inside them, and one day he’s trying to learn how to juggle with a group of friends, when suddenly he drops all three balls as his eyes meet icy blue ones from across the way, and he may no longer be celestial but he is still a star, still sees the essence of things, and so while he now actively notices the eyes and the jaw and the smirk, what draws his attention is the soul -- not pure by a long shot, but there is good in it, good in Len, good in his love he’d thought long lost and he’s always known that the universe contained miracles but this is the first one that’s happened to him.

**Author's Note:**

> Potential trigger warnings: there is death, as Len/Icarus dies in the style of the myth. He then comes back though! There is a happy ending!  
> Questions you might ask while reading: why do sentient stars have a concept of gender? Why would they use years or days as lengths of time? Why are there humans on all of these planets, when presumably evolution wouldn’t work in exactly the same way on two separate planets even given a similar starting point? I have a very in depth response to these questions, which is that I don’t know either, friend. Just go with it.


End file.
